On the 5th of March, Twitter is going to retire version 1 of its API. The replacement, version 1.1 is very similar, but with one major difference; every single call must be authenticated.

This means that come March, your existing API calls will break; including simple things like displaying tweets on your site. To fix this, you need to move to the new v1.1 API, and authenticate with Twitter.

In the last post, we looked at the basics of CSS transitions, including how to use easing to control how your animation flows. In this post, I want to look deeper at a very powerful easing feature; cubic bezier curves.

In short, they let you define exactly what path your animation will take, and thanks to some awesome community tools, they are extremely easy to use (No maths required at all). This gives you total flexibility with your transitions.

One of the best tools is the free Cubic-Bezier.com by Lea Verou. It lets you make new curves and see them in action just by dragging the handles. We’ll use it for all of the demos in this post, and it’s well worth a bookmark!

Transitions (basic animations) are one of the most popular additions in CSS3, and one of the easiest to implement for big gains on your site.

A transition is simply an animation from one set of CSS properties to another. So for example; whilst before you may have had links with blue text, which suddenly turned orange when you hovered on them, you would now replace that sudden jump with a more graceful animation.

In this post, we’ll look at the basic syntax, step through some examples, and finally take a brief look at current browser support.

In this post, I will show you a simple way to add a distraction-free “Reading Mode” to your blog. You can see the end result on this Reading Mode demo site (Click the highlighted “Reading Mode” link).

The purpose of adding a feature like this is to enable a visitor to remove all the clutter of your site, and focus solely on the post itself.

In an ideal world; there would never be a need for such a feature. In reality though, sites have numerous other goals to achieve, such as brand building, serving ads, promoting other content etc. In this way, you can compromise between the two. Do what you need when the user first arrives, but get out of the way when they decide what to read.

As bloggers, we spend a lot of time working on a range of different tasks. This includes things like checking stats, monitoring ad revenue, and interacting on social media.

That leaves us with a lot of sites to log into. But by adding a few WordPress plugins, you can pull some of this data back into the WordPress dashboard, which saves you time by giving a quick snapshot overview of everything.

I want to share a fantastic little tool that I’ve only recently come across; Live.js, written by Martin Kool.

This JavaScript file automatically checks for changes to your CSS and JavaScript files, and refreshes them.

That means you can have your text editor in one half of the screen, and a web browser in the other. When you save changes in the editor, the updates are reflected immediately in your browser. It really helps to speed up your development time.